Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/60

 56 No wonder poor Rosamond is disheartened and silenced by such an array of difficulties in her path. It is comforting to know that Godfrey himself comes to grief, a little later, with The Bard, and that even the wise and irreproachable Laura confesses to have been baffled by the lines,

"Oaten stop" was a mystery, and "eve" she thought—and was none the worse for thinking it—meant our first great erring mother.

No such wholesome blunders—pleasant to recall in later, weary, well-instructed days—would be possible for Miss Edgeworth's little people if they lived in our age of pitiless enlightenment, when even a book framed for their especial joy, like The Children's Treasury of English Song, bristles with marginal notes. Here Rosamond would have found an explanation of no less than forty-eight words in the Elegy, and would probably have understood it a great deal better, and loved it a great deal